Microphone piece (i want), (2022)
8 microphones with stands, chains
Microphone piece (i want) consists of microphones with stands, chains and things one may rather expect backstage – technical objects from the realm of infrastructures found in theaters, clubs, concert or dance halls. The piece assembles props or parts of a costume – remnants of a past performance, an invisible concert or a speech yet to be held.
What becomes tangible here is the relation between visibility and opacity: The spaces between on-screen and off-screen, sounding and listening, between the absent character of a performance and the liveness of visitors moving through the exhibition space. Focusing on the fragile moment of entering a stage and claiming space—a moment of visibility as well as vulnerability—the work opens the exhibition for the ambivalent and painful histories of being in/visible within a particular historical moment. The microphones stay silent and give no further hint as to whose voices they may or may not have been amplified. Taking refuge in their new appearance as abstracted artworks, presented in the white cube, the objects pick up on concerns witnessed early on in the archives of the Shedhalle. Caring for the risks and promises of becoming seen, both literally and politically, Microphone piece (i want) seems to amplify these concerns and address them forward into a contemporary moment of violent political backlash.
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera, often starting with a song, a picture, a film or a score from the near past. They upset normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship, as figures and actions across time are staged, layered and re-imagined. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about the conditions of performance, the violent history of visibility, the pathologization of bodies, but also about companionship, glamour and resistance.
Recent solo shows include: ‘Moving Backwards’, The Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale; ‘Ongoing Experiments with Strangeness’, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019); ‘Improvisation télépathique’, Centre Culturel Suisse , Paris (2018); ‘Everybody talks about the weather… we don’t’, Participant, New York, ‘Telepathic Improvisation’, Contemporay Arts Museum, Houston (2017); ‘In Memoriam of Identity’, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, ‘Loving, Repeating’, Kunsthalle Vienna, ‘Portrait of an Eye’, Kunstalle Zürich (2015); ‘Aftershow’, CAPC, Bordeaux (2013). Their work has also been included in may group exhibitions at The Hayward Gallery, London, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Tensta Konstall, Stockholm, The New Museum, New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Centre d’art contemporain de Genève, FRAC Lorraine, Castello di Rivoli, Torino among others.
Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry met at the Shedhalle in the 1990ies.
Renate Lorenz worked as a curator at Shedhalle 1994-1996. During that time and in collaborative practices, existing formats and concepts of art production and exhibition making were not only critically examined but also widely expanded. She also contributed with her artistic practice to several group shows at that time, namely “when tekkno turns to sound of poetry” (1994, curated by Sabeth Buchmann and Juliane Rebentisch) and “Hors Sol” (1995).
Pauline Boudry participated in several group shows: “Hors Sol” (1995), “Sex and Space” (1996) as part of a student collective, (a.o. together with Susanne Sauter), “If I ruled the world” (1997), “Sex and Space II” (1997) and “Kültür/Istanbul Biennale” (1997). Later on she co-curated “Supermarkt” (1998) with Marion von Osten.
